We will be rocking with these guys.  Not my normal type of music, (I just picked up the new Demon Hunter CD, it's skull melting), but I love live shows of all types.  I was know to rock "Slippery when Wet" back in the day too.  Stephanie is way excited though and we should have a great time.

Once again, a post revolving around this site. I love this site, it makes me laugh most of the time with posts like this or this and then BAM! You pull up Google reader one morning and get hit with this and realize how bad we suck at this. God should be the most heavily marketed thing going in my opinion. There is a quote from a marketing magazine in there that Jon breaks down so well to this, "If the church fails, we'll be able to fill the hole inside people with products." That is the scary truth of our society. I remember a Pastor at a conference say, "Nickelodeon is spending millions to market to our kids, why aren't we? Which message is more important?" Marketing isn't all about $. Point 2 in this post drives that home by defining marketing. Anytime you invite a friend or share your story or hand out an invite card, you're marketing. I think we have a lot of marketing majors in our church, let's market.

We start Leaving the House of Blues this weekend.  This is going to be an amazing series. 

The message is going to awesome (Tony is fired up about this series)

I know the music is going to be awesome (I've seen the set list, Seth has got this series nailed)

Our graphics for this series are the best I've ever seen (New designer is awesome)

The stage set is going to be incredible (Jason has outdone himself)

I am totally pumped about the whole thing, we are raising the bar and I can't wait to see what the future holds.

Well, I'm officially into my second week on staff at Fusion.  I can't begin to express how cool it is to be working over there.  I am starting to get a feel for things and am hoping to really start stepping it up over the next few weeks.  Things are not happening as fast as I'd like, I feel like I'm jamming a full work week into two days.  Getting into the whole schedule of doing church is different for me, everything revolves on a weekly schedule with a very imminent deadline.  There is not timeline slide or delay of delivery by a vendor to hold something up, Sunday is coming no matter what.  I knew that already (duh, doesn't everybody) but living it is a different kind of reality.  There are a lot of things I don't know yet, but I'm eager to learn.

What I do know is that, I love the challenge, I love being stretched, I love the staff, I love job, I love the fulfillment, I love the Vision.  I could not be in a better place.

We had a great time at our last small group tonight. We had pot luck dinner and I new as soon as I walked in, I was going to be eating way more food than I should. We had an unbelievable spread, pulled pork, german potato salad, macaroni salad and the best baked beans I've ever tasted (thanks Leticia). After that we chowed on cake and brownies and then began to look for a place to pass out. Scott's neighbor has this ridiculous fire pit in the backyard that she let use use. Wed fired it up and then roasted marshmallows and made s'mores. The kids loved it, we got to hang out and enjoy each others company, there was fire involved, it was a great night. I'm ready to get groups rocking for the summer!

"From The Almighty’s perspective, any diversion from the core mission of saving souls is probably time poorly spent." - Scott Adams

I pulled this from a blog post by Scott Adams on the Dilbert Blog title Gone with the Wind.  You can view the full post here.  He is making light of this story from the BBC about a priest who was trying to set a balloon record.  That quote is a very profound statement and should be our daily mantra to keep us focused on the task at hand.  In general, we tend to get sidetracked with things that are a "diversion from the core mission" constantly and it takes a lot of focus and drive to stay on course.  The most interesting thing about this post to me is that Scott Adams is a non-believer in every sense of the word, he questions everything and has no core beliefs.  Ironically, he seems to have a better handle on God's calling than some Christians do.

Samsung Chairman resigns, would the chairman of an American company handled this situation in the same way?

Lee Kun-hee, Chairman of Samsung and son of Samsung's founder, has resigned following an indictment on tax evasion charges. Lee said, "We, including myself, have caused troubles to the nation with the special probe. I deeply apologize for that, and I'll take full responsibility for everything, both legally and morally." Lee Jae-yong, the Chairman's son and heir to the Samsung throne also resigned as did Vice Chairman Lee Hak-soo, Lee's closest advisor.
(source - Engadget, original article here)

Standing up and taking responsibility for your actions, what a novel idea.

I go to a lot of shows, most of them are heavy metal or rock, that's just me.  I am going to Bon Jovi in a few weeks so I do get out to some shows that don't cause melted skulls every now and then.  I have a catalog of ticket stubs from past shows that is huge, including everything from The Moody Blues to Ozzfest.  My point is, I love live music and I've seen a lot of it.

I went to Gigantour last night, primarily to see Megadeth.  I love this band as mentioned in my earlier post but I have never seen them live before.  The show was UNBELEIVABLE!  I was amazed at the sound quality of the band as well as the venue.  It felt like me and 4000 other people crawled up inside the CD.  They played everything I could have wanted to hear from there old albums as well as a good bit of their new stuff.  You could tell the band was genuinely glad to be there playing.  Dave was talking to people in the crowd in between songs and really connecting with the audience.  I think Dave thanked the crowd 4 or 5 different times before they even played the encore.  When they were finally done the whole band came up to the front of the stage and did a bow to the crowd.  I've never seen any band act so gracious to their fans, it was really cool.  It speaks volumes that this band has been around for over 25 years, with the same front man leading it and their music is still true to their original sound without being the same crap over and over.  These guys are the Rolling Stones of the Heavy Metal genre.  This is definitely a top 5 for me of any show I've ever been to, awesome!

Well, I survived my first day on staff at the church.  It is so cool to be in there getting my hands dirty.  I had a great time working with the staff and just kind of laying low in meetings and getting a feel for things.  It is going to take a little while to really get up to speed but I'm ready for the challenge.  With my shortened part-time schedule, I'm having to really try to jam a lot of productivity into a short amount of worktime.  That is one of my main concerns, time management between 2 jobs and trying to not get spread too thin.  It's going to be fine but may be a little hectic for the first few weeks until I find the groove. Lot's of prayer and trusting God is in control.

I really like Tennessee. Everything is a little slower up here, I just wish I could work on a few things with these guys to really make it a perfect place. I like the slower pace on some aspects but dude, the speed limit says 45, try to keep up. 30 in a 45 is completely unacceptable. The country is beautiful here and the local park has the biggest playground I've ever seen called Kids Kingdom. It literally looks like a huge castle sprawled out over 1/2 and acre or so. Ethan loved it, we packed a lunch and went there to let the kids play this afternoon. They totally wore themselves out and napped for 3 hours after we got home, parks are awesome! This has been a great trip, we ate some of the best food ever for dinner tonight, all of it was cooked on the grill. I haven't eaten that much in a long time at one sitting. Ribs, pork chops, potato's and onions in foil, corn on the cobb and grilled squash, zucchini, mushrooms and peppers. I was so stuffed i thought I was going to pass out immediately following dinner. I've got to give some props to my mother in law, she always provides more food than we can ever eat and it is always excellent. So now, I'm sitting on the back porch in front of the fire pit, feeding wood into it, enjoying the full moon, starlit sky and mooing of the cows in the background. Man, I love it here.

- We leave in the morning to head up to Steph's parents in Tennessee. Should be a fun time, I enjoy hanging out with her folks and Ethan loves playing with Papa and his cousin Evan. Disappointed I'm going to miss Joe teaching at church on Sunday but we've had this trip planned for a while. I inquired about moving it and we don't have any other time to do in the near future.

- I already can't wait to get back though, Monday will be my first official day at the church. I'm excited to get in there and start getting up to speed. My mind is in overdrive thinking about stuff.

- Steph is dropping me off downtown on the way back from TN so I can go see Megadeth. Yes, everyone knows I'm a metalhead. I've always loved this band, I started listening to them in 6th grade, no kidding. Back then Dave Mustaine was cool because he got kicked out of Metallica for being to crazy. Full circle, Dave announce in 2002 he had gotten saved and was no longer going to play certain songs live anymore since his views had changed. How cool is that! This show is going to rock!

- I jogged today for the first time in a long time. It was kind of accidental but I forgot until today that I used to enjoy it. We have been walking in the neighborhood after dinner the last few nights and Ethan drives his Gator with us while we walk. I took the safety off so he could go into second gear tonight and man that thing was fast, I had to jog to keep up with him. He thought it was hilarious to have me "chasing" him. Anyway, might be my new exercise plan, as long as we remember to keep the batteries charged.

- My crackberry is acting up and I can't seem to figure out why. I can receive messages but cannot send anything out from the device. I've got somebody working on it but no luck yet. It's really freakin me out, I'm having withdrawals. I'm carrying an old treo on another account so I can reply to emails, sad situation.

Google maps has amassed enough traffic data to start predicting traffic for future dates. That is very cool especially if you are traveling to a new city. Check it out here.

I saw the trailer for this a while back and forgot about it. Just saw an update on Catalyst, it comes out tomorrow. I've got to make some time next week to go see this, should be very interesting.

Ben Stein's - Expelled web site

CTIA has posted their after show wrap up site with highlights from the event. You can check it out here if you are interested. I would recommend watching first and last clips from Branson's keynote under Day 1. We missed the Day 3 keynote so I'm definitely checking out the John Edwards, Fred Thompson stuff. Feed your geek on the Day 1 addresses from Richard Bach (Microsoft) and Dan Hesse (Sprint Nextel), interesting stuff in both of those.

I snapped this in Vegas and forgot to post, biggest limo I've ever seen and I saw 3 or 4 different colors of these running around.  It's hard to believe everyone saying we are in a recession after visiting Vegas.

My passenger side seatbelt in my Yukon is broken. You can't pull the belt out the retracting mechanism. I rarely have other people riding with me so I forget about it until my wife gets in the car with me and promptly crawls over the center console to sit in the back seat where she can strap in. My 3 year old asked what was wrong with the seatbelt and we told him it was broken. In typical 3 year old style he asked, why? I told him it just happened, no real reason other than it was probably wore out. He accepted that answer and moved on but it stopped me. I commented to my wife there are a lot of people like that, broken, just plain wore out for no real reason.

I am a very technical, problem solving, analytical type of person. When something is broken, not only do I want to fix it, I want to find out what caused the problem in the first place and fix that as well so we don't have the same problem again. This works for most things, including people, unless you are dealing with the wore out factor. If an object wears out, you write it off and replace it. You can't write off and replace people. The problem is there are a lot of people that are just worn out, worn down, broken. No one thing or event has broken them that they can reference to keep it from happening again, no source to correct. The only thing I know of that can fix wore out people is Jesus.

We have had some major tree problems for at least a year now and have been putting off getting it taken care of.  While we were in Daytona a smaller tree up on the hill actually fell over my fence and hit my neighbors house putting a small dent in his gutter.  He was very cool about it, I was bothered more than he was about it.  When our builder graded the lots for the houses in my neighborhood I think he let a drunk monkey run the bulldozer.  Every tree in my yard was either nicked or gouged to bad to survive, or had too much fill dirt put in around the base to try and level the yard that it choked out the roots.  I'm not the only one with this problem, you can see many dead trees near houses in my neighborhood now.  So we broke down and called in some experts to tag and bag the goners, and do a little Kevorkian magic on the few hanging on by a thread.  Check the pics below, click for full sized images.

Yard Pre-Massacre

During the Massacre

Yard Post-Massacre

We got a great company to do the work, if you need any trees cut give me a ring for a contact.  Hopefully the yard will get back to normal fairly quickly, the grass got hammered.  Not shown here are 2 trees we took out in the front yard as well.  I didn't count but I'm guessing we took 15-20 trees out total of varying sizes.  I only had 1 good size and 2 medium size trees in the fence that were healthy enough to leave.  Add to that 4 small dogwoods for a total of 7 trees left inside the fence.  I can't wait for fall, leaf duty will be so much easier.

I'm still stuck on this site, I've been reading it in chunks and while most of the site is very satirical but true, it keeps me laughing. Every now and then I come across one of the posts that really strikes me and makes me think. This was one of them, dealing with Christianity being boring. I totally agree with this and think that, more often than not, we forget being a Christian is a fun, exciting ride.

Davis has done this. I may have found it by accident and I don't think he realizes what he has started. I love it, excellent work Davis!

I changed my feed service over to feedburner today, hoping to get some better usage stats from the site. I mean, who are you people? If you subscribe to this blog via a reader you may have to update your feed link. It's supposed to be seamless and not interrupt the feed service but you know how well "seamless" works most of the time.

I am excited to announce I will be starting as the Executive Pastor at Fusion Church on Monday April 21st. I'll be working at the church offices Monday and Tuesday every week and my role on Sunday's will be changing as well.

I can't begin to explain how humbled, honored, intimidated and jacked up I am about this.

The more involved I've gotten with serving and leading at the church, the more I've felt like this is where I am supposed to be. At first it seemed like a foolish dream, then someone else confirms it, then I had to sit on it, pray and see if it goes away. I really feel like God has been doing a lot of "stuff" with me over the past few months in some semblance of preparation. I think this is kind of like having kids in some sense, you'll never really be ready. I remember Pastor Tony asking me if my bones were on fire a couple of different times during this period. The point was that if you were being called to the ministry, it wasn't something you can ignore. The first time he asked me, the answer was a no, almost like that's crazy talk. Around the end of last year, things were definitely heating up. I was not able to sleep well for weeks at a time, my mind was racing, I was praying like crazy, it was on. Tony asked me the question again, knowing the answer was yes, it was just a matter of, how can we make this work, really, how is God going to make this work? God's timing is, as always, perfect. At times during the past few months I wasn't sure if this was going to happen at all, I've had a lot of crazy stuff going on at my company as well. Looking back now it's easy to see how the chain of events leading up to this moment string together correctly and a hundred different not so good outcomes could have happened.

I am blessed to have this opportunity and am really looking forward to working with the rest of the staff at Fusion. I can't wait to start using my talents to further the Kingdom of God.

Got this from lifechurch.tv today and can't stop reading, laughing and agreeing. Unfortunately, I have experienced #137 more than once, although the background music sounded more like the theme from "Deliverance" than the ocean. Enjoy!

Stuff Christians Like

These may turn out to be the fall of man. Jelly Belly's ain't got nothing on these. Somebody stop me!

 

Ethan was talking to the baby last night (stephanie's belly) and asked
"mommy, can the baby smell my farts?"

Everybody watches chef shows nowadays, I've seen a few of them myself but the best show and most honest personality I've seen is Anthony Bourdain on his Travel Channel show, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.  Everytime I watch this show I want to eat all kinds of different food, it makes me want to get out of my eating comfort zone.  I love his no BS attitude about everything, he is not concerned with putting on a front for someone else, he is just passionate about food and everything that goes into it.  This quote about vegetarians is priceless, this guys rules.

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine."

-Anthony Bourdain, from his bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential

Nothing against little girls, but this is one of those things that makes boys so much fun for me. A boy and a lizard, all is good.
 

I'm at a loss for words. Who buys this? Who are these people that agreed to star in the commercial is an even more disturbing question.

test using windows live writer.

woohoo!

Everybody knows kids say the darnedest things, right? Well, my kid, being the fact that he is my kid, is growing up and learning from me. This is a terrifying thought not just to me, but to most of the people who know me as well. With that being said, I'll start posting Ethan quote's that crack me up. I don't even ask "what is this kid thinking?' because I've been there.

Reference - Ethan takes his clothes off to get in the bath and turns his head around to look at his rear.
Quote - "Daddy my booty has hills"

I changed my site template a week or so ago and forgot to re-insert the analytics code back into the html and now have no site stats for that period. I feel so unloved...(hold on, wiping a tear). I wouldn't say this is the first time this has happened to me. You would think the company that offers a blogging platform and an analytics package, all for free, would offer a little tighter integration between the two. Why aren't analytics built into blogger by default? Get your crap together Google!

This just goes to show, people will always find some reason to complain about free stuff.

I'm sitting in the raffles cafe at mandalay bay casino  grabbing a bite before heading up to bed.  Not quite an all nighter like we have traditionally pulled on the last night here but close.  The 4 hour flight that leaves at 8am is a small hindrance to that but this is also one of my longest stays in Vegas.  I really love this town but 3 nights is really about all I can take at once. 4 nights is border line on needing to be committed. A little bit of a love hate relationship happening. This town has a way of grinding you up and completely draining you if you don't watch it. Vendors want to take you out and pull you in a million different directions and some have questionable agendas. We have gotten a lot done as far as work goes this week but our schedule has been pretty brutal with non-stop meetings on opposite ends of the strip at all hours of the day and night.  Going 2 miles down the strip can take 20 minutes plus during the day and even longer at night.  Being out of town this long really makes you lust to be home with your family.  Don't get me wrong, it has been an enjoyable trip and having everyone in the industry in one town for the same time is a huge business benefit but, I'm ready to get back and hug my wife and kid, it won't be long now and I'll be back to home sweet home!

View of the strip from the hotel room at night. The Luxor beams its light to the aliens.

Cool Keynote speech this morning from Richard Branson. Very interesting guy who never quits. Anytime he was told no or faced adversity, he looked at it as a challenge and went at it wide open. Not the best pictures, the first one is a close up of the massive screen and the second is a zoomed out view.

We are getting ready to head over to the convention center. I'm excited, the keynote speaker this morning is Sir Richard Branson. The guy is brilliant and a whole lot of crazy, it should be good. If you haven't heard of him, he owns a couple of small companies you may have heard of. I'm wondering if he is going to rappel from the ceiling to the podium or something.

This is the coolest game in Vegas. Very cheesy but a lot of fun. This picture is actually from last year when me and Steph were out here. It combines multi-line slot machine play with the Wheel! It's one of the higher entertainment per dollar games here. Hey I'm up $6 thanks to this game.